Sensor Fusion

Additional Resources

A major hurdle for wearable technology and the IoT is the reduction in size of critical semiconductor components, including sensors, to enable smaller systems, reduce power consumption, and costs. By shrinking the size of a sensor, it’s easy to envision a world where these tiny devices are seamlessly incorporated onto everyday things, providing valuable motion and context-relevant data that enhance consumers' lives.Michael PalmaIDC Corporation

Today’s wearable and mobile devices incorporate various sensors to capture information about a user’s behavior, movement and location. And all of these sensor signals and raw data need to be translated and processed into meaningful insights. Sensor fusion is the process of taking inputs from multiple sensors and fusing the data together to provide a something more than any one sensor alone. For example, an indoor navigation application relies on inertial motion sensors, beacons and Wi-Fi to gather information about where a person might be within a shopping center. However, each of these inputs taken in isolation will not provide the pin-point accuracy needed to guide a person to the exact store he may be looking for. That’s where Sensor fusion software comes into play. It gathers all of this data and fuses it together to enable the indoor navigation application to provide a highly accurate view of where the person is relative to his final destination.